Entertainment

Turning back time in your tv room

Time is said to heal all wounds, but is not always kind to movies. Celluloid degrades, leaving preservationists to struggle. Genres and tastes evolve, turning some movies into quaint artifacts now, even after making an impact in their day.

With those factors in play, this week's vintage titles have unique challenges ... and qualities. None is related in style or content. Each recently debuted on Blu-ray, with various levels of restoration involved:

* FACE-OFF: 40TH ANNIVERSARY LIMITED EDITION: This is the 1971 Canadian hockey movie, not later Hollywood iterations under the same title. During the 1970-71 NHL season, hockey enthusiastic and film producer John F. Bassett put his team to work on Canada's answer to Hollywood's love story. The result really is in the quaint category, but I heartily recommend it. With Art Hindle starring as a rookie on the Toronto Maple Leafs, and Trudy Young as the drug-damaged folksinger who loves him but hates hockey violence, Face-Off is cheesy. But the fromage is delicious.

With his connections, Bassett gave pedestrian director George McCowan extraordinary access to NHL games as milieu for the convoluted romance. So we see the real Leafs -- Keon, Ullman, Henderson, Ellis, Baun, plus George Armstrong (in his final season) and Darryl Sittler (in his first) -- playing against Detroit with Howe, Montreal with Beliveau, Boston with Orr. Aside from game action, Armstrong and Bruins star Derek Sanderson also score major support roles. Because they were shot on colour film, the games are superior to the crappy TV archives of hockey action from the same season. Face-Off is an important historical document in sports. The images mostly look great, with only one mediocre segment, although sound remains inferior.

In the two-disc DVD & Bluray combo pack, Face-Off also gives us the hilarious, 11-minute SCTV parody of Face-Off, starring John Candy as battling Billy. Also amusing is the folksy Face-Off commentary shared by Hindle, Young and producer Harve Sherman.

* BLUE VELVET: 25TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION: In David Lynch's masterpiece of perversion, naive hero Kyle MacLachlan tells his new girlfriend, schoolgirl Laura Dern, a simple truth: "It's a strange world, isn't it?" Writer-director Lynch has always been obsessed with plumbing the depths of what is "strange" and presenting it as drama. Nothing of his is more sexually and violently twisted than Blue Velvet, which astounded audiences in 1986 and continues to do so today.

The restoration for Bluray is immaculate, with a precision of detail that is astoundingly beautiful and, of course, profoundly disturbing. Dennis Hopper's anger as the villain, and Isabella Rossellini's submission as the victim, remain as potent and weird as ever. As extras, the Blu-ray offers 52 minutes of "lost footage" that makes the strange world of David Lynch even stranger.

* LITTLE BIG MAN: Arthur Penn's tragi-comedy dates from 1970, so it missed out on an anniversary celebration. The Blu-ray (like its companion release on DVD) has no extras. But at least the epic is decently restored.

As cinema, Little Big Man remains perplexing for some because it mixes camp comedy with deep tragedy, including in its depiction of the murderous ways of General Custer and the U.S. Army. As shown here, they all deserved to die at Little Big Horn for crimes against humanity -- and Dustin Hoff man's title character was there to witness justice being done. Overall, this movie cannot be compared directly to Dances With Wolves -- a superior drama -- because it deals with the complexities of genocide through Hoff man's careening life story, as he bounces back-and- forth between white and First Nation societies. Little Big Man is what it is: A bizarre, entertaining and interesting attempt to grapple with one of the Big Lies of American history.